Today, I am excited to announce that Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6 are available for download.
These releases are the next big step in the journey we outlined last November to bring the productivity of Visual Studio and .NET to any developer working on any kind of application while also delivering a new level of innovation in developer productivity for all Visual Studio developers.
So what’s the deal with .NET these days? As in, can you use it to develop Windows 10 universal apps (or whatever the hell Microsoft is calling them this week)? Or is it just for sever-side stuff and web development/ASP.net?
I’d be curious to know about this, too. I know from a test install of VS2015 that everything but the kitchen sink is still supported (from MFC to WinForms to .NET etc.) but I would really like to hear MS issue a clear statement on the potential deprecation / repurposing of most of such toolkits. Having them concentrate on Windows Runtime for everything would IMHO be a big incentive for developers – a single, well-structured, cross-language and modern API is probably something Windows has never had properly.
Is the minimal install still a ridiculous ~9GB?
Minimal install is ~5GB.
Add full C++ support (Which isn’t included by default), it’s about 8GB.
Windows SDK for Windows 8.1 adds 3GB (My guess Windows 10 support isn’t included, since I’m installing on Windows 8.1? I can test that later…)
As someone who’s starting to try to make games with MonoGame, my install is about 12GB.
That’s the Base install, Xamarin (Included with the installer, also adds Android SDK and NDK), but not the Android Emulator (Hyper-V based, conflicts with VMWare Workstion). Also, no C++.
So..still ridiculous then. I’ll stick with using MonoDevelop with Unity then.
This only really amounts to 1-2 of today’s AAA computer games. I don’t really see the problem.
If you prefer MonoDevelop + Unity by all means stick to that, but claiming it is the disk space required by Visual Studio seems like a rather silly excuse to me.
While I like to think I’m a decent programmer I don’t think I’ll be creating any AAA games any-time soon.
Installing VS with all it’s idiotic parts (Hyper-V? Really? ARM development? Get real) is just not an option.
This especially sucks if you just want to do a classic Win32 C app with it.
Were much better off with e.g. VS 2005 for that. It used to be a really great development tool until about ten years ago. By now it has become a bloated, ugly mess.
Time to see if Xamarin + MonoGame works with it. I seem to remember slight bugginess with the last preview version…
EDIT: I just remembered. The issues I had were with the emulators for Android and Windows Phone. I’ll give it a spin with both the included Xamarin, and external Xamarin installer, since I figured out how to debug directly on my phone. I’m certainly excited
EDIT 2: I forgot. The Android emulator is Hyper-V based, which could be really really neat, only I use VMWare Workstation, and you can’t have the two installed together. Guess I’m stuck with testing on my phone…
Edited 2015-07-21 02:25 UTC